Once more unto the breach: AMD’s Trinity takes on Intel’s Ivy Bridge

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Today marks the official launch of AMD’s Trinity APU on the desktop, and hopefully heralds the beginning of a brighter future for the company’s products. The past 18 months have been ugly; Bobcat’s strong debut was marred by AMD’s decision to fire then-CEO Dirk Meyer, and Llano sales were undercut by manufacturing difficulties at GlobalFoundries. Bulldozer missed its performance and thermal targets, Sunnyvale was forced to cancel its Krishna/Wichita follow-up to Brazos, and a number of important engineers/executives were either laid off or left.

Through the midst of this turmoil, the company’s remaining engineers have persevered in unenviable conditions. Trinity AMD’s first desktop part to fuse Bulldozer’s architecture and a new GPU. The mobile version met with reasonably good reviews, but AMD still sells millions of desktop CPUs a year. Can the higher power envelope of the desktop form factor help Trinity hit higher performance targets?

Evolutionary adaptations, competitive pricing

We’ve discussed both Bulldozer and Trinity at significant length over the past year; I’d recommend you consultour variousstories if you need a refresher on either architecture. For our purposes today, it’s enough to understand that Bulldozer had significant problems that AMD couldn’t immediately fix. GlobalFoundries was already ramping Trinity production when BD launched 12 months ago, and that means AMD had only a limited window in which to improve the architecture.

Incremental performance improvements, in other words, are the order of the day. With Trinity, AMD focused on solving the thermal issues that kept the chip from reaching high clock speeds and on improving IPC when and where it could. Here’s the company’s new desktop lineup:

The 5800K is $122, the 5600K is $101, and the dual-core 5400K is just $67. At those prices, AMD has set itself up to compete mostly against low-end, last-generation Sandy Bridge parts with low-end, Intel HD 2000 graphics. Intel’s Pentium G2120 is AMD’s $100 competition (Intel’s chip is based on Ivy Bridge and clocked at 3.1GHz with a 3MB L3 cache and no Hyper-Threading. The Core i3-2220 is AMD’s stiffest challenge. Intel launched the chip just a few weeks ago; it’s a 22nm Ivy Bridge dual-core at 3.3GHz with Intel HD 2500 graphics and Hyper-Threading support.

The best thing about AMD’s price structure for this launch is that the company appears to have learned from its mistakes. One of the reasons Bulldozer had such a rough launch was AMD’s insistence on keeping the chip priced well above the six-core, 45nm Thuban core it was supposed to replace. Despite its age, the older chip offered better overall performance, and left the FX-8150 sitting in no-man’s land.

At $122, the A10-5800K avoids this problem. The chip’s pricing is no accident; at $122, the A10-5800K is going to match graphical blades with Intel’s cut-back HD 2500 graphics, not the full HD 4000 solution. The lower-end processors will face off against a melange of Pentium-brand Sandy Bridge hardware, which rely on the older HD 2000 graphics. That said, there are already a few IVB-based Pentium chips and Intel may reinforce this product divisions if it feels the need.

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